Get Happy

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Consider these two simple questions: How much of your time and effort are spent trying to increase your income? And how important is that income to your overall happiness?

While pondering that, consider this recent experiment out of UBC and Harvard Business School. Researchers asked 300 people at various income levels how happy they were. The subjects were then asked to guess how others at different income levels would rate their own happiness.

The study found that higher incomes do indeed lead to higher levels of happiness but – and here’s the catch – not as much as people think. Participants in the experiment were usually quite good at guessing the happiness of people at higher income levels but incorrectly assumed that those with less money would be significantly less happy.

According to Lara Aknin, lead author of the study and a PhD student at UBC’s department of psychology, this should give many of us pause for thought: “Some people are sacrificing a lot to make more money, thinking that it’s going to buy a lot in terms of happiness, when in fact it doesn’t seem to buy that much.”

This study is merely the latest nugget of insight in a growing school of thought among economists and public-policy theorists about the role of government in trying to grow public satisfaction, and not just the economy. It stems in part from the discovery that although wealth in developed countries has increased rapidly, levels of satisfaction have not.

Economist John Helliwell is a co-director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and, as the author of a recently released book on government and social well-being, he’s an expert on happiness. If anyone, he’s the guy who can answer the question, What actually makes us happy?

When people’s basic material needs are met, strong social connections with friends and family are a big part of the picture, he says. A sense of freedom and of having a meaningful part to play in the workplace, in governance and in the community also does much to increase overall happiness, as does trust in leaders and institutions. So giving people more time to spend with their families and to contribute to their communities would likely do much more for everyone’s happiness than a few points of GDP growth.

“Public policies have falsely assumed that people are concerned much more with their own material lives than their broader lives and, more importantly, the lives of other people,” Helliwell says.

But try selling that in an election. Which, by the way, is exactly what the Green Party of Canada has been trying to do for years. “Obviously it’s important to have a healthy economy,” emphasizes federal leader Elizabeth May in a recent interview with BCB, “but not for its own sake; it’s because it supports a healthy society.”

The Greens’ message of relaxing our fixation on the economy is running up against the false belief that the UBC experiment uncovered: people believe money governs their happiness. “People are fearful of change; they’re afraid that the changes will leave them materially worse off,” May says.

But there’s an easy way to start making happiness a bigger part of the picture, she says: measure it. That is, replace the dominant measure we use to judge the health of our society, the GDP, with a measurement that reflects both economic health and social well-being. Helliwell agrees, arguing at a conference in Florence in July that agencies such as Statistics Canada should start making regular satisfaction measurements.

“That’s a first condition,” Helliwell says. “You measure what’s important, and you treat as important that which is measured.”